Father Pitt

Tag: Lang (Edward B.)

  • St. Mark’s Church, McKees Rocks Bottoms

    St. Mark’s Church

    Edmund B. Lang1 designed this church for a Slovak congregation in the McKees Rocks Bottoms; it was built in about 1914.2 The church is not a church any longer, but it has been in use as an antiques auction gallery and thus has not been allowed to decay too badly. Through the magic of twenty-first-century technology, we can see the whole front of the church, right up to the cross on the steeple, almost the way the architect saw it in his imagination, although he probably was not imagining those utility cables draped across the front of the picture.

    From the side
    1. We had originally written “Edward B. Lang,” copying the listing, but the excellent historian Kathleen Washy of the Catholic Historical Society was kind enough to send us a correction. Construction listings were often sketchy on exact names; fairly close was good enough. ↩︎
    2. Source: The Construction Record, December 27, 1913: “Architect Edward B. Lang, House building, will receive bids until January 5, on constructing a one-story brick and stone church, at McKees Rocks, for St. Marks Roman Catholic Congregation. Cost $50,000.” ↩︎

  • Excelsior Club, South Side

    Excelsior Club from the sidewalk
    Inscription over the door

    This little clubhouse on a narrow back street is modest to the point of shyness: you can walk right past and never notice it, partly because of the well-grown tree in front, but mostly because it is a good citizen of the streetscape. Yet it rewards a closer look. It was built in about 1914 to an Arts-and-Craftsy Spanish Mission design by Edmund B. Lang.1 In the Construction Record, it is credited to E. M. Lang. The address, however, is right for Edward B. Lang; and that magazine is so full of misprints that one often finds an architect’s name spelled three different ways on the same page.2

    Excelsior Club

    Edward Lang is an architect who is not much spoken of these days, but he had some significant buildings to his credit—St. Mark’s Church in the McKees Rocks Bottoms and the Passionist convent in Carrick, to name two. The firm of Edward Lang and Brother was quite productive in the southern city neighborhoods, the Brother being Herman Lang, who is credited with St. George’s Church in Allentown and St. Basil’s in Carrick, among many others.

    A different angle
    Excelsior Club

    For readers who are interested, here is an example of the kind of detective work old Pa Pitt does for you. Why would someone write “E. M. Lang” instead of “E. B. Lang”? The answer is obvious when we remember that the Linotype was by far the most popular machine for typesetting periodicals. The Linotype has its own keyboard arrangement, and the M and B are right next to each other, where a fumblefingered typesetter can easily hit one for the other.

    Linotype keyboard

    A Linotype keyboard. Copyright 2006 Marc Dufour for Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

    1. We had originally written “Edward B. Lang,” which was how we found Lang’s name spelled out in another construction listing. But it appears that that listing was also incorrect. The excellent historian Kathleen Washy of the Catholic Historical Society was kind enough to send us a correction. Construction listings were often sketchy on exact names; fairly close was good enough. ↩︎
    2. July 4, 1914: “Bids will close on the 6th inst. for building a one-story brick club house on South Thirteenth street, for the Excelsior Club, 94 South Thirteenth street, plans for which were made by Architect E. M. Lang, 804 Penn avenue.” ↩︎